by Erik Hanberg
“You’re going to get through this just fine, Ellie.”
“I didn’t think I’d still be on the ship,” she said. “The doctors told me what would happen if I deliver early, but I… half-listened. I just knew it wouldn’t apply to me. I’m going to have a baby in space, Byron.”
“Women have been having kids on the moon for years. It’s not that different. Doctors know what to do.”
“They still have at least some gravity there. We’re weightless here, Byron. They don’t let pregnant women onto the space shuttles—and those even have artificial gravity! —no one’s ever been more than three months pregnant in space—I’m already a first—and now—they don’t know what’s going to happen—they—”
“Everything is going to be fine,” he said, making his voice sound as soothing as he could muster over his own sudden anxiety. “Let’s call Dr. Coronovschi. She’ll know what we need to do. Little Jane is going to enter the world perfectly safe.”
Ellie started crying again. “You know I want to name her Jane? I wanted to tell you in person, Byron. I really did. It’s for my mother. For the woman who named her daughters Elinor and Marianne, well—she would love to have her granddaughter named for Jane Austen.”
“Not Darcy?” he asked, doing his best to make conversation and keep her—and himself—distracted.
“Darcy is a man,” Ellie said, wiping her nose on her shirt. “It’s his last name. And besides, that’s the wrong book. Elinor and Marianne are from—” She stopped and grimaced again. After a few deep breaths she opened her eyes. Sense and Sensibility, she concluded.
“That didn’t look like a practice contraction.”
“It wasn’t.”
His ring buzzed and he accepted the call.
The avatar of Dr. Coronovschi appeared next to him—in his own mind, she was standing next to him in a white doctor’s coat.
“You already know?” he asked.
“Of course. We monitor Ellie twenty-four/seven. You’re surprised?”
“I want to talk to her,” Ellie breathed.
“Transfer call to the wrap,” Shaw said, as he pulled the wrap off his forearm and gave it to Ellie. The avatar of Coronovschi disappeared and she was on the screen.
“First thing, Ellie—I want you to know that everything is going to be fine,” Coronovschi told Ellie with such a soft Eastern European voice that Shaw felt his body begin to slowly calm.
“Is Jane going to be OK?” Ellie whispered. “We’re still so early, and we’re in orbit! Will she—”
“She’s going to be a beautiful, healthy baby, Ellie. I promise. Every first-time mother is scared at this point, no matter how many g’s of gravity she’s in. I’m going to be talking you through this, but you should know that we have the best team in medicine monitoring you. Between the six of us, we’ve helped tens of thousands of mothers deliver children on Earth and on the moon. You’re in good hands. Do you hear me?”
Ellie nodded rapidly.
“Here’s where we are, Ellie: there were just under five minutes between those last two contractions. And you’re already dilated to three centimeters. That means we’re already getting to the end of early labor. Things can move faster during low-g births, so there’s nothing unusual to that, OK? If I had to guess, you’re going to start getting some real contractions within an hour.”
“That last one wasn’t real?” Ellie exclaimed.
“It was real. But they’re going to get stronger,” Coronovschi said. “Now, I want you to close your eyes and take some slow deep breaths. Byron, can you hurry to the mess hall and get Ellie some bags of water?”
Shaw pushed off the ceiling and aimed as fast as he could for the door to the great room. Globs of amniotic fluid splashed off his face as he sailed through the air.
Through the door.
Down the hallway.
Into the mess hall.
He was so focused on getting up into the stores, he almost missed that Wulf was at the table.
“What’s the hurry, Byron?”
“Ellie,” Shaw answered, grabbing the bags. “She’s in labor in the great room. I’m going to need your help.”
Shaw was out the door again before Wulf could respond.
Ellie accepted the bag gratefully. She began to sip. “You look like you’ve just been through a birth canal yourself, By,” she said, looking at him with one eye.
Before he could respond, Ellie had another contraction, her face furrowing tightly. Shaw squeezed her hand.
When it was over, Dr. Coronovschi said from the wrap, “Ellie, I need you to give the wrap to your husband. I need to send him on some more errands. Slow deep breaths until your next contraction!” Ellie gave the wrap to Shaw and closed her eyes.
“What do you need?” he asked Dr. Coronovschi’s face on the screen. He had more mental space to register her features this time. Thin face, snub nose, dark hair pulled back into a pony tail. She was younger than he’d assumed. Younger than he and Ellie, even. With a pang, his mind flashed to the young doctor Nura in Poligny. He felt the anxiety in his chest start to bubble up again.
“I need you to prepare the delivery room,” she said. “And quickly. We don’t want her to give birth in this wide-open room. You’ve already seen what happened with her amniotic fluid.”
“Where do you want me to set up?”
“My team thinks that Wulf’s bunkroom is the best place. It’s a decent size, and there’s only a single bed in there—no double bunks getting in the way. And it has an exterior wall.”
“What does an exterior wall have to do with anything?” Shaw asked, already moving.
“A lot. Which is the next big task … you’ve got to get the ship spinning. Someone from my team has already sent the ideal ship’s orientation and speed to your wrap. Make it happen. Once you do, the delivery room will be on the axis of the spin, which will give you some gravity to work in. It should mimic being in about half of Earth’s gravity, which we think will make delivery a lot easier.”
“You think?” Shaw asked.
“Well… the Walden isn’t really designed for this. For one thing, the ship’s center of mass is not exactly in the center of the sphere, so there will almost certainly be a wobble to the spin. If it’s too uncomfortable for Ellie, we’ll have to figure something else out. But that probably means braces or straps of some kind, which no one wants.”
“Another issue. I can’t get to the controls myself. What if I can’t get Taveena to spin the ship for us?”
“As I said, we’ll figure something else out. Things get much easier if we can get at least partial g’s for Ellie and Jane, though.”
“OK. What else?” Shaw asked—anything else was bound to be easier than trying to get Taveena to go for this plan.
“You need to raid the medical cabinet in the mess hall. We’ll need almost everything there, but get Wulf to set up the tissue and blood printer first thing.”
“We have a tissue and blood printer on the ship?” Shaw asked dumbly.
“Yes. When your friend Annalise shattered her hand on the hull of the ship with you, that’s how she got a new hand,” Coronovschi answered. “We need it to start creating blood for Ellie. Like everyone who spends any length of time in space, her blood volume is down almost twenty percent. We need to get her on an IV—if something goes wrong and she loses any blood during delivery, we don’t want her starting from such a low volume.”
Shaw gulped. “Please tell me you’re not just winging this, doc.”
“We’ve been planning for this eventuality for three months. We know every possible resource available to you on that ship. You’re going to be fine. But you need to start. The contraction Ellie’s having right now is already coming twenty seconds faster than the last one.”
By the time Wulf had programmed the tissue printer to create bags of blood matching Ellie’s blood type, Shaw had stocked his bunkroom with other supplies from the medical closet and tossed into the hall every spare item from Wulf�
��s room that wasn’t on Dr. Coronovschi’s list.
Ellie was floating in the middle of the bunkroom, wrap in hand. Only fifteen minutes had passed, but the time between contractions had dropped rapidly. Shaw didn’t have time to ask what that meant but Ellie was having to focus on the contractions more and more. The furrows in her brow seemed permanent now. And sweat and strain showed all over her face. He didn’t want to leave her, even for the few minutes between contractions, but there was one final thing he had to do.
“Wulf!” he shouted down the hall for a third time.
“It’s OK. Go talk to Taveena,” Ellie said. “I have her.” Meaning Dr. Coronovschi.
“She can’t sit next to you.”
“Just go talk to her,” Ellie repeated, before she gave a sharp cry and pinched her face together in pain. “GO!”
Shaw rushed from the room, her scream echoing behind him. The control room was on the exact opposite side of the ship, and it took several precious seconds to push himself weightlessly through the hallways until he arrived at the door.
Shaw hammered on the locked door with no thought to how Taveena would interpret it. His anger rose above any concern he might have had for pissing her off or even making her think he was attacking. He needed her to open the door.
Shaw started hollering as he struck the door. His fists were aching, but he kept going in spite of the pain.
Wulf dropped down from the main deck of the ship with two bags of blood in his hand.
“Give it a rest, Byron!” he shouted, pinning Shaw’s fist to the door. “Have you ever known anyone to respond well to a tantrum like that?”
“She needs to spin the ship. Now.”
“There are secondary controls in the great room.”
“And if I use them, every door on the ship will open—except this one—and we’ll be sucked into space,” Shaw said and watched Wulf pale at his words. “You were right. She has countermeasures in place to prevent me from going after her.”
Wulf collected himself. “The control room is on our comm system. If you use it, will it trigger anything?”
“I don’t think so,” Shaw said, shaking his head. He hadn’t seen anything in her programming about comms but he wasn’t confident enough to tell Wulf a flat “no.”
“In that case, there’s a station in the old sphere room,” Wulf said. “Use that. I’ll take these to Ellie and get more going. If you can’t talk Taveena into making the adjustments, I’ll try.”
Wulf left him and Shaw opened the door to what had been the sphere room—from where the raiders had once used rows and rows of black spheres to manage their entire network back on Earth. The shelves were empty now, and that made the closest comm unit even easier to locate.
Shaw pressed its wide touchpad, activating it, and paused. He’d vented most—but not all—of his anger on the door. Whatever he said now, he wanted it to be the right thing. Should he plea? Barter? Threaten?
He decided against all of them. “Ellie went into labor early,” he said clearly and calmly. “The doctor wants you to rotate the Walden to create g force for her. I’m uploading the needed changes to spin and speed into the ship’s computer now. Please acknowledge.”
Maybe her calculating logical brain would be willing to process an unemotional transmission. Shaw waited ten seconds and then repeated, “Please acknowledge.” Another ten seconds. “Please acknowledge.”
There was a subtle change of the noise from the speaker, and Taveena said, “Acknowledged.”
Did that mean she was going to do it? Shaw decided not to push it, not even a thank you. There wasn’t time and he didn’t want to risk doing anything that might change her mind.
He pushed his way back up to the main deck and then up the hall that led to the bunkrooms. He sailed by his own room, and then Ellie’s. But as he neared Wulf’s room, something new happened.
His stomach lurched. Suddenly he wasn’t moving weightlessly through the air, but he was full-on falling. He went through last few feet of air in the hallway in a head-first drop and crashed into the end of it. Only at the last second was he able to twist his body to take the impact on his shoulder.
It wasn’t too hard—as the doctor had said, the g-force of the spin was less than half of normal gravity on Earth. But it was hard enough. He scrambled to a sitting position and put his hand on the upside-down door.
Inside the room, Ellie and Wulf seemed to have survived better. The bunk mattress had been pushed against the rounded exterior wall and Ellie was already on it doing her breathing exercises.
Wulf had been working to construct a makeshift baby warmer, but the parts had collapsed with the addition of gravity and he was trying to sort through the mess.
“You OK?” Shaw asked Ellie. She nodded, but didn’t stop her breathing exercises.
“Taveena used the comm to give us a warning that she was about to start the spin,” Wulf said, nodding toward a unit on the wall. “Climb on in.”
Shaw clambered through the upside-down doorway. “What’s happening?”
Wulf gave the wrap to Shaw and Dr. Coronovschi was ready with a reply: “Ellie’s beginning active labor. She’s four centimeters dilated. The contractions are going to be more intense now. She’ll need you.”
Shaw spent the next two hours feeling ineffective at best and helpless at worst. He gripped Ellie’s hand and tried various forms of encouragement. He found himself latching onto some small thing she’d said and then driving it into the ground so much that he caught her humoring him. It galled him that while she was in labor she could still be worried about him. “Don’t worry about me!” he wanted to shout. “I don’t need you to make me feel like I’m helping.”
Although he clearly did. Ellie couldn’t offer any suggestions—she’d never been through labor before and was feeling her way through it as much as he was. They’d both jumped into women giving birth before, but somehow it wasn’t the same.
Dr. Coronovschi suggested different positions and breathing techniques to alleviate the pain. They each had limited success. But really, Shaw thought, what was a new breathing technique supposed to do when Ellie’s body was wracked with painful contractions every couple of minutes? He got the sense that the tasks he and Ellie were assigned amounted to not much more than busy work to get through the interminable painful hours.
Ellie’s contractions were now farther apart—which scared Shaw initially, but was apparently very normal—and she was dilated past eight centimeters. She drank some water, and together they were mentally preparing for what they both knew was coming next.
“The ship is missing a few key ingredients to print an epidural,” Dr. Coronovschi told them as Shaw held the wrap up for them to look at together. “You have pain meds on board, but we don’t want to do anything that might thin the blood any further. I’m afraid, Ellie, you’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.” Shaw must have blanched because she quickly cut in, “Women have been doing this for thousands of years, Byron. The body knows what to do.”
Shaw squelched his nerves and nodded.
“There is something we have to address, however. The team has been reviewing every centimeter of Ellie’s uterus and vaginal canal—”
“Because that won’t make a woman feel self-conscious,” Ellie breathed out.
“And we’re worried about the placement of the umbilical cord,” Dr. Coronovschi continued. “There’s a risk of a prolapsed cord.”
“What’s that?” Shaw asked.
“When the umbilical cord drops through the cervix before the head. With Ellie’s water already broken we wouldn’t normally worry, the head has dropped onto the cervix—one of the reasons for your pain, Ellie. But the low gravity means there will be greater chance for Jane and the cord to move around inside you if you shift your weight—and you’re going to want to shift your weight. The AI is giving us a sixty percent chance it will happen during delivery.”
“Sixty percent?” Shaw echoed.
“Yes. If
it goes unmanaged, it’s a significant risk factor. A prolapsed cord cuts off oxygen to Jane and then we have an emergency situation,” she answered, somehow still sounding calm and soothing.
Ellie’s hand found Shaw’s. He squeezed gently.
“You said ‘if it goes unmanaged,’” Shaw prompted.
“Yes. We can manage it. But it will take the hands of a doctor on board with Ellie.”
“I can guarantee you, Taveena won’t let another ship anywhere close to us.”
“There’s another way,” Coronovschi said. “Your implant.”
Shaw’s fingers slipped out of Ellie’s hands and went to his temple and realization dawned. “Oh. You want to tandem with me.”
“Yes.”
“Why not Wulf or—”
“Neither Wulf nor Taveena have implants. Only you and Ellie have them, and—”
“And there’s no point going tandem with Ellie during her own pregnancy. Right.”
“It’s got to be you,” Coronovschi said. “Are you up for it? I know it’s unorthodox but—”
Shaw nodded and tried not to gulp or show any of the hesitation he was feeling. “Of course. Anything.”
“Good. Because that leads us to the next complication. Wulf has volunteered as a nurse. But I need another.”
Shaw bit his lip. “You and Wulf can’t do it together?”
“I’d like a team of six, but since that’s not an option, I’ll settle for two.”
“Taveena’s not going to agree to help. What about a drone or something?”
“Hardly. This is all hands on deck. I need Taveena, Byron. You’ve got to get her to help us.”
Shaw hit the comm unit before Coronovschi could say anymore.
“Wulf, I need you back in here.”
“On my way, Byron,” Wulf answered immediately.
Shaw left the comm open.
“You too, Taveena.”
Silence.
“Ellie is facing a high-risk delivery, she needs every chance she can get.”
More silence.
“This is not a trap, Taveena! I will be in a tandem jump with the doctor the whole time.”